It’s the most colorful time of the year. Across the Colorado Rockies, clumps of trees in the pine forests are turning yellow, yellow, yellow. That’s because our Front Range deciduous stands are aspen, aspen and aspen. If you want something that looks a bit more like New England, try Steamboat Springs. It’s the only place I’ve seen in Colorado that really sprouts a variety of colors in autumn.

All the same, hiking through our yellow woods can be a gorgeous experience. My favorite autumn trails near Denver crisscross the aptly named Golden Gate Canyon State Park. Last fall a ranger there recommended a hike to Frazer Meadow, where the modest metal home of John Frazer, a one-legged homesteader, still rusts in an open field encircled by aspens. I hiked there via Ralston Roost, a relatively strenuous approach that crests with a great view of the Rockies from the roost’s craggy summit. Dude’s Fishing Hole, a pond in the aspens, is another good place to take a sandwich and a camera in Golden Gate Canyon.

These moose, near the Mitchell Lake area of Brainard Lake Recreation Area off the Peak to Peak Highway, are out most mornings.

Dawn at Brainard Lake, a good hour from most Front Range civilization, means an awfully early morning. For me, in Boulder, it meant 4:30 a.m. On a Sunday. That’s the downside. The upsides? The temperature up there at 10,000 feet was 35 – the morning excursion marked the only part of my day that involved cool. The dawn light was magnificent, painting the east-facing granite slabs of Mount Audubon a sublime pink-lilac.

But the moose were the highlights. And they weren’t alone – photographers from along the Front Range were there snapping away, as they are most weekend mornings. One group involved a cow, two calves, and at least two bulls, the whole mess of them just standing in chest-high (in human terms, overhead) vegetation and eating leaves. Mostly willow. Another patch of meadow held a single bull, working his way through the feast.

Before it gets too cold (winter is coming – we hope), get the coffee, the warm clothes, and the cameras ready and head up to Brainard. The moose won’t mind.

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Several months ago, my colleague Douglas Brown wrote about something his family does periodically: Amish Weekend. They spend the weekend together with no television, no internet, no telephones, just … each other. Come Monday, it turns out all of that digital stuff is still there waiting. Did they miss anything? Maybe, but what they gained (time together, in-person connecting) was far more important.

Deserts are a favorite for trail runners, and this five-mile series of loops on the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument is strikingly excellent

I don’t run on roads. They wreck your legs, your hips. Roads are for wheeled things. But I’m crazy for running on trails. Tons of trails thread the Front Range – rocky and rutted trails, straight up and screaming down trails, wildflower-surrounded trails and pine-perfumed tails. And I dig all of ’em. We’re lucky.

But I probably prefer desert trail running to anything else, with this stipulation: Not when it is 100 degrees outside. In particular, I adore the trails of eastern Utah, the trails of soft red dirt or packed sand, the trails that dive into canyons and follow washes and climb atop mesas. I find the juxtaposition of red rocks and ground, sagebrush, juniper, cacti, blue sky, and white clouds awfully stirring. I like the sounds – the lizards scurrying across and under leaves beside vegetation-lush canyon trails, the wind, the ravens caw-cawing and even the whush sound their wings make when they come close. I like the silence, too.

I clocked about 10 miles of running in these shoes in the Utah desert last weekend; my feet ached, but I'm sold.

Thanks to Newton Running shoes, five years ago I changed my gait from heel-striking to mid- and fore-foot landing. So the move to Vibram Five-Finger running shoes — or whatever they are (Shoes? Part of a lizard costume?) – wasn’t a transformational change.

But still, it was a biggie. The FiveFingers come without support. The only thing between my feet and the ground is a thin layer of Vibram. Before going on vacation in Dinosaur National Monument with a group of Boulderites (and a rogue bunch of Basalters), I spent a few weeks walking around in them, and even going on one three-mile mountain hike in Boulder.

In addition, I walked the 10k Bolder Boulder with my family in the shoes (and that ended up being 10 miles of walking because the wait for a bus back home was too long). But in the Utah desert, I was going to run. And I wondered: Would I ditch the shoes after a mile and return to normal trail-running sneakers? Would I destroy my arches and calves? Would I bang my toe on a rock and break something? I already had one broken toe, the result of a soccer game played truly barefoot a week before (I didn’t have proper shoes, we were just playing a bunch of kids, so I went barefoot. D’oh!)

How would I deal with a long weekend of, essentially, running barefoot? With a broken toe?

Beauty all around. Stillwater Canyon on the Green River, Canyonlands National Park.

There are lots of cool and interesting things to see and do while kayaking the Green River through Utah’s Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons.

Dozens of Anasazi ruins — including the two-story lookout tower at Ft. Bottom — are tucked away among the cliffs. There are petroglyph panels decorated with horned gods and mysterious messages. There’s Register Rock, the Bowknot Bend “post office” and the outlaw cabin supposedly used by Butch and Sundance in their horse thieving days. Numerous side canyons offer hikes into the secret delights of places like Upheaval Dome and the surreal landscapes of The Doll’s House and the Maze in Canyonlands National Park.

Initially our plan for a kayaking trip down the Green exuded mellowness. Tom Brown and I would launch at Ruby Ranch north of Moab and leisurely paddle and drift for five days and one hundred miles to Spanish Bottom below the Green and Colorado River’s confluence. Along the way we’d see the canyon sights, do some hikes, lay around like lizards on the beaches, grow fat on all the food we’d brought and become so carefree, lazy and indolent, we’d forget our names. With so much contemplative time all the mysteries of life would be solved.

Instead we ended up paddling through the canyons as if pursued by howling horned gods.

First though my friend Tom Brown and I have to shoehorn a formidable mound of gear into our sea kayaks—enough stuff to take us a hundred miles down the Green River through Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons in Canyonlands National Park.

Once we leave our put in at Ruby Ranch, near Green River, Utah, we’ll be in remote, semi-hostile, lonesome, road less, people less wilderness. Hurrah for that! But it also means that the two of us will have to be totally self-contained and self sufficient, able to handle anything from self-rescue to an emergency appendectomy. But that’s what God made multi tools for isn’t it?

Travel and OutWest editor Kyle Wagner grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Lake County, Ill., and Naples, Fla., before moving to Denver in 1993, where she reviewed restaurants for Westword before moving to The Denver Post in 2002. She considers the best days to be those that involve her teenage daughters and doing something outside, preferably mountain biking or whitewater rafting.

Dean Krakel is a photo editor (primarily sports) at The Denver Post. A native of Wyoming, he has authored three books, "Season of the Elk," "Downriver" and "Krakel's West." An avid kayaker, rafter, mountain biker, trail runner, telemark skier and backpacker, Dean's outdoor adventures have taken him around the world.

Douglas Brown was raised about 30 miles west of Philadelphia in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he spent a lot of time running around in the woods and fields (where he hunted and explored), and in the ocean (where he surfed and stared at the horizon). Now he lives in Boulder and spends as much time hiking, running, skiing and boarding the High Country (and the Boulder foothills) as possible.

Ricardo Baca is the entertainment editor and pop music critic at The Denver Post, as well as the founder and executive editor of Reverb and the co-founder of The UMS. Happy days often involve at least one of these: whitewater rafting, snowshoeing, vintage Vespas, writing, camping, live music, road trips, snowboarding or four-wheeling.